Posts Tagged ‘real estate’

In my last post, I talked about how one-day-deal websites exploit your sense of urgency to make you spend money you otherwise wouldn’t.

I became particularly aware of this after reading Robert Cialdini’s Influence.

Cialdini is an American psychologist. His book Influence is all about techniques of persuasion and in particular, how these are used in politics, marketing and sales. Cialdini’s aim in writing the book is ostensibly to enable people to detect when these techniques are being used and thus to protect themselves. But you can’t help noticing from online reviews that marketers and sales people pretty much use his book as a manual.

As Gio would say, I love this book so much I want to marry it. I’m planning to write more about Influence, but for now I want to stick with the urgency thing. Urgency is covered in Influence in the chapter on scarcity:

… Something that on its own merits held little appeal for me had become decidedly more attractive merely because it was rapidly becoming less available.

… people frequently find thimselves doing what they wouldn’t much care to do simply because the time to do so is running out. The adept merchandisers makes this tendency pay off by arranging and publicising customer deadlines that generate interest where none may have existed before.

Those one day sites don’t have to have a 24 hour window. They could be two day sites, or one week sites, or shock! they could have no time limit at all, and just be a remainder warehouse with a catalogue. There’s a reason they have the arbitrary, needless limit of one day only — it’s because they sell more that way than if they just listed their stock and waited for you to come to them. Hence my belief that in keeping tabs on such sites, you’re asking to be sucked in to spend money you don’t mean to.

Cialdini doesn’t mention this, but of course if you’ve only got a few hours, you’re not exactly going to be able to do due diligence as well as if you had a few days. Nor are you going to be able to cool off and reassess the way that you could if you went home from a shop and thought about it.

This stuff is everywhere, of course. We’re still looking for a house (yeah, it’ll be six months soon) and I have been struck by how real estate agents try to create a sense of urgency in you. I have come to detest this as particularly manipulative.

Oh, there’s been a lot of interest. I’m expecting this one to go quickly. I can let you have a look now — it might not last until the open home. When can I expect your offer — this afternoon? Or shall we say 10 am tomorrow?

There are plenty of houses, pal. If we miss this one, I expect there will be another one soon enough.

So we have found a house we really like (or are mildly interested in, when we talk to the seller’s agent). It is for sale by tender.

Tendering is a particularly noxious process in which you hope you aren’t being a fool, and the vendor hopes you are. If it weren’t for the fact that the place is just down the road from where we are now, with neighbours we know and like, I’d be inclined not to participate. But there you go.

We know the rateable value (it was done in September this year) and we have a report from QV on recent sales in the area (which unfortunately has an unhelpfully wide range). The house is in one of those pockets of Wellington with a very varied geography so it’s hard to make meaningful comparisons with nearby properties.

Any tips on tender strategy, dear readers? High to be sure, low to be cheeky? I lie awake at night thinking about it.